From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by David Turver

The Low Carbon Contract Company (LCCC) manages the Contracts for Difference (CfD) subsidy scheme and publishes data to show how much it costs us. The data is usually published about 10 days in arrears and sometimes is adjusted. Now, we have the full data for August 2024, and it has settled down enough for some reasonable analysis.

Overall Subsidy Levels Rising

The headline is that overall CfD subsidies rose sharply in August 2024, recing a total of £237 million – the third highest total on record and by far the highest level for the month of August (see Figure 1).

The total is up £84.2 million from July’s total. The main driver of the increase is offshore wind, which is up £74.5 million from a month ago. This August’s total is also up £123.8 million from August 2023. Since August last year, offshore wind subsidies are up £72.3 million, biomass conversion £35 million, biomass with CHP up £10.2 million and onshore wind £5.1 million.

There are several factors driving the increase in subsidy since last year. First and most obviously, more wind farms have now activated their CfDs since last year. Moray East and Hornsea Project 2 offshore projects came online earlier this year, as did the Sneddon onshore wind farm. Moreover, the CfD part of Drax biomass plant was not used at all last August, but it attracted £25.6 million in subsidies in August 2024.

Load Factors

However, the number of turbines claiming subsidy is not the only driver of increased subsidy. Load factors are also up. This means that both onshore and offshore wind farms produced closer to their theoretical maximum during the month (see Figure 2).

Using the nameplate capacity recorded by LCCC for each installation, we can calculate the load factor for each project and aggregate it by technology. In August 2024, CfD-funded offshore windfarms achieved a load factor of 34.7%, the third highest August on record, the highest since August 2020 and up three percentage points since last year. Onshore wind achieved 24.9%, the second highest August load factor on record and up from 16.7% last year.

More wind means more generation and, other things being equal, more generation means more subsidy.

Subsidy per MWh

The other things that drive the levels of subsidy are the CfD strike prices and the reference price used to calculate the subsidy level. For offshore wind, the weighted average strike price has fallen by £23/MWh from about £178/MWh in August 2023 to £155/MWh this year. This is because of the aforementioned addition of Moray East and Hornsea Project 2, which both have lower strike prices than the earlier offshore wind farms. The strike prices for onshore wind are up a few pounds from last year to £113/MWh, and solar is up £4 to £110/MWh.

However, the Intermittent Market Reference Price (IMRP), which is used as the baseline for the price that renewable electricity was sold for in the market, is down significantly on last year. The average IMRP, weighted by generation, has fallen about £25/MWh from £76/MWh in August 2023 to about £51/MWh in August 2024.

The subsidy per MWh is calculated as the difference between the strike price and the IMRP. The upshot is that the subsidy per MWh for offshore wind is up a bit since last year and is up sharply for onshore wind and for solar power (see Figure 3).

Gas prices are lower this year than they were last, so that explains some of the reduction in IMRP, because gas often sets the market rate of electricity. However, adding more uncontrolled renewable generation can also affect the IMRP. There were two days in August when the weighted IMRP for offshore wind fell below £20/MWh and three occasions when the weighted IMRP for solar fell below £10/MWh. Provided the price stays positive, this does not matter to the generators; they just make up the difference with extra subsidies. If the price goes negative for a time, then some wind farms are not paid curtailment fees.

Conclusion

The addition of the newer, cheaper offshore wind farms has not had a significant impact on the subsidy per MWh. The reduction in average strike price has been overwhelmed by a combination of the indexation upwards in April and cheaper gas prices since last year. Even if gas prices stay at the current elevated levels, we are unlikely to see a significant reduction in the subsidy per MWh because increased generation from renewables pushes down the IMRP, thus increasing subsidies. For the generators it is heads they win, tails the consumer loses. We can expect more record subsidies between now and February 2025 as the seasonal load factors creep back up and Drax is kept running to replace our last remaining coal plant, which shuts shortly.

David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack page, where this article first appeared. 

Judges shouldn’t write laws that anti-fossil fuel factions can’t get Congress and People to enact

Paul Driessen

Earth’s climate has changed numerous times over the past half-billion years. But activists claim any recent or future changes result from fossil fuel use and agricultural practices.

Those activities raise still minuscule levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (0.04, 0.0002 and 0.00003 percent of the atmosphere, respectively), allegedly altering climate and weather. Water vapor, Earth’s complex and chaotic climate system, and powerful solar and cosmic forces that combined to bring the Carboniferous Period (coal age), ice ages, a Little Ice Age, warm periods, and fluctuations in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are supposedly no longer relevant.

UN, US and EU climate activists, politicians and bureaucrats then blame fossil fuels for heat waves, cold spells, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts and even abusive husbands. Kamala Harris says manmade climate change forced millions of illegal migrants to cross our borders since 2021.

Despite all this, the climate consortium has failed to get enforceable, workable international treaties that compel all countries to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It’s failed to get the US Congress to enact national legislation – or make a convincing, robustly debated case that reducing a few GHGs can stabilize planetary temperatures and climate conditions that have never been stable.

So the consortium employs other devious strategies: regulating fossil fuel technologies and agricultural practices into oblivion; ignoring the 63% of global GHGs that come from China, India and a hundred other developing countries; and censoring and silencing experts and talk show hosts who present inconvenient facts, data and analyses.

Climate activists are also filing lawsuits in state courts against eight US oil companies whose products together account for a tiny fraction of the 11% of global GHGs emitted by the United States.

Nearly three dozen ultra-progressive jurisdictions want friendly in-state judges to decide complicated issues that arise from and affect every family, business, city, state and country on Earth. Instead of scientific and legislative debates and processes, they want one judge punishing energy companies for causing “dangerous climate change.”

The litigants claim they’re trying to save our planet from climate cataclysms. Their real goal is reducing our driving, flying, household heating and cooling, red meat consumption, living standards and free speech rights, even if doing so has minimal or no effect on emissions or the climate.

They want to avoid higher-profile federal courts that would more likely examine their far-fetched claims from national, international, scientific and economic perspectives. They’re worried that the US Supreme Court may decide whether far-left cities or states can circumvent legislative processes and instead use state courts to impose radical environmental and social agendas.

There is nothing ethical, legal or constitutional about this crony forum-shopping and backroom dealing. That’s another reason the plaintiffs panicked about the Supremes’ potential intervention, and argue that state judges can competently litigate the matter.

To ensure judicial “competence,” the Environmental Law Institute launched a parallel effort, the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP), to ensure that judges receive an “authoritative, objective and trusted education on climate science, the impacts of climate change, and the ways climate science is arising in the law.”

Of course, as Humpty Dumpty would have told Alice, when the CJP uses a word (like authoritative, objective, trusted, science or justice), it means just what they choose it to mean, neither more nor less, because the ultimate question is who is to be master – activist litigators and judges, or We the People and our elected representatives.

Raising even more questions, the CJP is funded by the same outfits that finance these climate lawsuits. The JPB Foundation gave $1 million to the CJP and $1.15 million to the far-left Tides Foundation’s Collective Action Fund, which pays the Sher Edling law firm to file lawsuits like these. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation donated $500,000 to the CJP and $150,000 to the Action Fund. And so on.

The left knows their political ploy will tumble if the highest court in the land reviews the cases. That would be bad for them but good for our system of checks and balances, for common sense, and especially for reliable, affordable energy, jobs, healthcare and modern living standards.

Over 80% of our energy still comes from oil, gas and coal. Wind and solar are notoriously unreliable, require expensive backup power, and need a dozen times more raw materials per unit of electricity than natural gas generators. They cannot provide petrochemical products, including clothing, cosmetics, fertilizers, paints, plastics, pharmaceuticals and wind turbine blades.

“Renewable” energy is not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. Manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles and grid backup involves mining for numerous metals and minerals, in energy-intensive processes that destroy habitats, pollute air and water, and injure and poison miners and their families.

Much of that mining occurs in countries with corrupt governments and desperately poor families, like Congo and Myanmar where child and slave labor are pervasive. Ships haul the materials to China, the world’s largest polluter, which monopolizes the global battery production market and uses more coal, slave labor and pollution-intensive processes to produce “clean, green” energy products.

The EVs get marketed as “zero emission” vehicles, because there is no exhaust – and people don’t know this sordid history or that the electricity charging their batteries comes mostly from coal- or gas-fired power plants. And battery fires are furious and toxic.

Wind turbines also depend on oil, gas and coal for the metals and minerals in their towers and generators, fiberglass-and-epoxy blades and concrete-and-rebar bases. Solar panels blanketing hundreds of square miles of former cropland and wildlife habitat cause similar impacts. Sea-based wind turbines harm and kill wildlife, including endangered whales; land-based turbines kill millions of birds.

Pleadings and briefs in lawsuits brought in carefully chosen liberal state courts can ignore inconvenient facts like these, often preventing judges and juries from considering them.

They can target a few American oil companies for alleged climate cataclysms, while ignoring all other oil and coal companies worldwide, and countries that emit 89% of greenhouse gases. The state court lawsuits essentially and preposterously assert that production and refining processes used and products sold by these few oil companies are causing climate changes unprecedented in Earth and human history.

Recent Supreme Court decisions reveal why climate alarmists and rent-seekers are alarmed that the Court might intervene. West Virginia v. EPA held that, in the absence of clear legislative authority, government agencies cannot unilaterally issue regulations that have “major” economic or political significance.

Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo reversed the “Chevron deference” rule. Silent or ambiguous statutory texts no longer give administrative agencies unfettered power to interpret laws in ways that let them increase control over people’s lives and livelihoods.

Liberal state court decisions in these climate cases would have monumental consequences – for our environment, economy, lives and nation – despite Congress never having given any agency or court any such authority.

The Supreme Court should definitely intervene here – to ensure that these complex scientific, economic and political issues are fully studied, debated, vetted and voted on – not relegated to biased courtrooms.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

Guest “Zombie killing” by David Middleton

Geology says the Anthropocene is horst schist…

March 20, 2024

The Anthropocene

In 2001 the atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, proposed that human activity was impacting natural environmental conditions to the extent that we had effectively left the natural stable conditions of the Holocene and moved into a new interval that he named the Anthropocene. In response to this suggestion, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was established in 2009 on the initiative of Phil Gibbard (PLG: the then chair of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy; SQS). The remit of the Working Group was to examine the evidence for human induced climate change as reflected in the recent geological record, and to determine whether this was sufficiently compelling for a new stratigraphic unit to be included in the Geological Time Scale (GTS) and, if so, at what rank. The Working Group, initially led by Jan Zalasiewicz (JAZ) and latterly by Colin Waters (CW), deliberated for 15 years before finally submitting a report to the SQS in late October 2023.

[…]

Following standard ICS procedure, it was expected that there would be 30 days allotted for the discussion of the AWG proposal, to be followed by 30 days for voting. Because of a possible conflict of interest, JAZ and MAH recused themselves from the administration of the voting process (although both participated in the discussion), and the discussion and ballot were conducted by the 1st vice-chair Professor Liping Zhou (Beijing University: LPZ) and Professor Adele Bertini (University of Firenze: AB), and who ensured that the process adhered strictly to the rules of ICS. However, when the discussion period ended and the Secretary moved to call a vote, both JAZ and MAH objected saying that the discussion period had been of insufficient length and that additional information on the Anthropocene proposal had been excluded. This did not find favour with a substantial number of SQS members who were anxious to move forward to the ballot. In order to meet the request for more time, however, LPZ and AB agreed to extend the discussion period, which was initially expected to end in late December, until the end of January. Voting finally began on 4th February, in spite of further objections from JAZ and MAH based on their view that adequate time was not allowed for discussion. It ended on 4th March at which point the results were declared.

The outcome was a decisive rejection of the Anthropocene proposal: 4 votes in favour; 12 votes against; and 3 abstentions. Three members did not vote, including JAZ and MAH, who then began a campaign questioning the legitimacy of the vote on procedural grounds and alleged contravention the ICS statutes. It is important to stress that there was no question of impropriety against either LPZ or AB, both of whom acted with complete integrity throughout a difficult process and who carried out their duties fully in accordance with the statutory requirements of ICS. Nor can the integrity of the SQS membership be called into question. All who participated in the process are geological scientists of the highest calibre, from a range of countries, and with wide expertise in
Quaternary stratigraphy and chronology. It is clear from the comments that were made during the course of the discussion period, that many were unconvinced by the arguments in the AWG proposal, and their misgivings are clearly reflected in the decisive nature of the voting outcome.

The vote of the SQS has been recognized as valid by the ICS Executive, and that recognition has been near unanimously supported (15 yes, 1 abstention, 1 conflict of interest) by the chairs of the seventeen IUGS subcommissions, who are the ICS voting members. Although their proposal has been decisively rejected, the AWG has performed an important service to the scientific community by assembling a wide body of data on human impacts on global systems, and this database will be an essential source of reference well into the future. Moreover, the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions. But it will not be recognised as a formal geological term but will more usefully be employed informally in future discussions of the anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic and environmental systems.

[…]

International Union of Geological Sciences

The PNAS paper cited In the I effing love science article features this graphic:

OK… Anthropocene: 1940-1980 RIP.

Next?

Reference

Kuwae M, Yokoyama Y, Tims S, Froehlich M, Fifield LK, Aze T, Tsugeki N, Doi H, Saito Y. Toward defining the Anthropocene onset using a rapid increase in anthropogenic fingerprints in global geological archives. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Oct 8;121(41):e2313098121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2313098121. Epub 2024 Sep 23. PMID: 39312679.